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    How to be a Successful Writer
    How to be a Successful Writer
    How to be a Successful Writer
    Ebook155 pages2 hours

    How to be a Successful Writer

    By Barbara Hayes

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    About this ebook

    Speaking from years of experience in the publishing world, Barbara Hayes gives her advice and guidance to anyone who wants to be a successful and published writer. Barbara has worked on comics, newspapers, magazines and books, building up a unique breadth of expertise in many different types and formats of publishing.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBretwalda Books
    Release dateAug 27, 2010
    ISBN9781907791130
    How to be a Successful Writer
    Author

    Barbara Hayes

    Barbara Hayes worked on the editorial staff and spent many years writing stories and picture strip scripts for the Amalgamated Press, situated in Farringdon Street, which is round the corner from Fleet Street, London. Later Amalgamated Press became Fleetway Publications and subsequently part of the Daily Mirror IPC publishing group.Barbara was just in time to work with some of the old Fleet Street hacks in all their drunken glory before the move away from Fleet Street to modern technical respectability.She got advice straight from the lips of Hugh Cudlipp, the famous editor of the Daily Mirror, and became married to an Amalgamated Press editor, Leonard Matthews, who rose to be a managing editor and then an editorial director.Over the years she has had some 80 books and about 7300 scripts published by companies from England to Australia to South Africa to Florida and back to Holland.She likes to think of herself as an old hack writer who succeeded mainly because she always got her work in on time and the right length - but if you read on carefully you might find quite a few other hints to help you.

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      Book preview

      How to be a Successful Writer - Barbara Hayes

      How to be a Successful Writer

      (or even an editor - well this is how I did it)

      by

      Barbara Hayes

      Published by Bretwalda Books at Smashwords

      http://www.BretwaldaBooks.com

      Copyright © Barbara Hayes 2010

      This book is available in print from www.amazon.co.uk

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ISBN 978-1-907791-13-0

      Contents

      Introduction

      Starting off Right

      Good General Advice

      First Writing Steps

      Style

      More General Advice

      What to do if you are Losing Readers

      More Basic Rules and Writer’s Block

      To Work through an Agent or Not

      Talent, Facts and Ghosts

      Useful Survival Hints and Writing to Length

      How to Work with Artists

      And Talking of Drunks...

      How to Write for Picture Strips

      Identical Scripts, Pranksters and Other Problems

      Horrors in your Path

      How to Answer Readers’ Letters

      Isn’t it all Strange?

      Conclusion

      Published Works written by Barbara Hayes

      Introduction

      Do you know the difference between an author and a writer?

      An author seeks the fame and the glory, but a writer expects to be paid.

      Always remember, you want to be a writer.

      In the old days my type of writer was called a Fleet Street Hack, but with the arrival of computers the word ‘hack’ has come to have a completely different meaning.

      So perhaps we should be talking about ‘jobbing writers’ - I will try to remember. In any case we mean someone who has no grand ideas, but who takes any legitimate writing job going - and glad of it.

      The old Fleet Street Hacks I did know gave me a lot of good advice including - Never trust anyone, especially newspaper people. (and newspaper people said: Never trust television people!) - and - Listen dear, until you know what the fee is, don’t even take the cover off your typewriter.

      Now in the beginning I was a poor little girl from Watford, near London, who went to the local Grammar School, became head girl, took a six months secretarial and accountancy course and then went to work in the Big City.

      This book contains the hints and cunning tricks (like working hard) which helped me to become a well paid writer, who now lives in comfortable retirement.

      I have already passed on my words of wisdom to my son, who has had over 200 books published.

      So something I am saying must be correct.

      By the way, I spent most of my working life in magazines, so forgive me if I sometimes talk about magazines. The hints I give work just as well for newspapers, radio stations and other forms of writing.

      I hope these hints will help you too.

      Good luck!

      Chapter 1

      Starting off Right

      Get a job in a publishing house(or in the same building will do.)

      For an aspiring writer, this is the best advice in the world

      The only jobbing writers I ever knew all started off working on the staff in editorial. This a cruel fact, but true. Starting any other way is a long hard haul and you have to pitch up in editorial in the end. At the Amalgamated Press we were paid a fairly low basic salary for doing our regular jobs - secretary, sub editor, art editor, editing weeklies, editing annuals or summer specials - whatever, but we were paid extra fees if we got any writing or artwork accepted and which was published in one of the publications. After a while I was doubling and trebling my salary with ‘freelance’ work.

      So there you are - if you possibly can, even if you are sweeping the floor or making the tea, get into the premises of a publishing house.

      If Daddy owns the company and you can start at the top, so much the better.

      But even starting at the very bottom is good. If you are in the office where the magazines/books/newspapers are being put to press, you will see what sort of work is wanted, in what form it is wanted, who is commissioning/accepting/rejecting it.

      Once you are in the building, try to work near the person who is commissioning some simple work which there is a remote chance you might be able to produce. That is to say the writing concerns something you know about.

      Make yourself useful. Offer to do anything - retype someone else’s manuscript - count pages - go to see a writer/artist in your own time to pick up late work - fetch the doughnuts - anything which needs doing.

      For weeks be happy to look at the work being accepted from other people. You will see the format and style the editor likes.

      Getting your first job of real paid-for writing is extremely difficult.

      Don’t be discouraged if it takes a long time. Remember everyone else is trying to get paid work - and most of them were there before you. Also you should realize that getting a publication ready for the printers is a relentless and merciless task. Everyone already established on the staff will always be busy getting work ready for press day.

      Well-paid-for-work will already be assigned to experienced writers.

      Trying to get anyone to consider your efforts is firstly pushing an existing writer out of a job and secondly embarrassing your fellow workers, because any colleague who looks at your work will need to tell you where you are going wrong.

      As going wrong you will be.

      Asking for work is no way to make friends, however one good way into writing is to offer to do the work that absolutely no one else wants to do - And that is to answer readers’ letters.

      If you are in a publishing house with large circulation magazines or newspapers, there will be special departments for answering readers’ letters. Correspondence Departments we used to call them. These departments normally have quite a staff turnover as the work is tedious and depressing. So there is a good place to apply for a job when you are trying to find a way into, or at least nearby, editorial.

      Even being in the same building as editorial is a step in the right Direction.

      You meet people going up and down in the lift. You chat to them in the staff canteen. And of course you always look smart, clean and act well-behaved.

      Answering readers’ letters may not be your idea of literary fulfilment. Your work will not be published, but you will most certainly be writing and all writing is good practice. At the end of this book I will give you some brief guidance on how to answer readers’ letters. Long, long ago I worked for two years in the Correspondence Department of a national woman’s magazine, then selling some three million copies every week in Great Britain and receiving readers’ letters by the sackful - so I do know what I am talking about.

      But now back to the editorial office and how you are struggling to get your start. Incidentally all this ambitious effort would have to take place in a non-union house. Don’t even start me on the old Fleet Street print unions - let us hope you never have to struggle with the likes of them.

      Anyway, if you are working on a small publication which does not usually invite readers’ letters there will be ten to twenty of them arriving a week anyway - all kicking from one person’s desk to another with everyone too busy to deal with them.

      Look at them. Write a sample reply. Show this to the editor/sub editor/whoever.

      Offer to answer all the readers’ letters as well as doing your normal work. Or of course if your office never gets readers’ letter, offer to do some other type of boring, unglamourous work which no one else wants to do.

      You will be greeted like a saint from heaven.

      Assuming you are answering letters, give drafts of your replies to the letters to whoever has the authority to sign them. Don’t forget to read the advice I give you at the end of the book. Readers’ letters are a minefield, believe me, but that is why everyone will be so grateful to you for dealing with them.

      If the drafts are approved, put them through the computer on the correct headed notepaper. Get them signed by someone really in authority.

      Importantly, no one with any experience or sense ever signs a letter to a reader with their own personal name. Always use and notice that other people always use the pseudonym of the agony column or the name of the character in the set to whom the reader has written. e.g. from Aunt Agatha or from Furry Bunny’s Human Secretary - whatever.

      Keep a note of the names and addresses of the people to whom you send letters and which person superior to you okayed them.

      If for some reason a reader sues, you want to be covered.

      I must say again: Never ever answer a reader’s letter on your own authority however old the letters are nor however much they need clearing up. Readers can be dynamite and are capable of seizing on anything unwary, wrong, or misspelt you might have written and spreading it around to get themselves on television, in the national press, you sacked from your job - anything to bring some colour into their dull lives.

      In spite of these risks, offering to shoulder the burden of dealing with readers’ letters or some other piece of drudgery, is always a good move. If you keep the office clear of readers’ letters everyone will love you. You will be showing the editor a sample of your creative writing and more important you will be getting good lessons in what the readers are thinking.

      What to do if you do not Live near a Publishing House

      If you do not live near a publishing house and have no chance of getting a job in editorial, your task is more difficult.

      Sending in samples of your masterpieces to magazines/book publishers is rarely productive. Remember, the people who have finally made it into editorial are busy writing copy themselves or giving spare work to their friends and established writers.

      Why should they bother with licking into shape anything you send in from the back of beyond? There is nothing in that for them. They are not going to do it, are they! Would you?

      However do not despair.

      Go to the bookshops and magazine stalls. Look at what is being published. Look at what sells

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